Dreams poems
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Madame Of Dreams
© William Stanley Braithwaite
To John Russell Hayes
KNOW a household made of pure delight,
Fifty Years Apart
© Anonymous
They sit in the winter gloaming,
And the fire burns bright between;
One has passed seventy summers,
And the other just seventeen.
Within and Without: Part III: A Dramatic Poem
© George MacDonald
SCENE I.-Night. London. A large meanly furnished room; a single
candle on the table; a child asleep in a little crib. JULIAN
sits by the table, reading in a low voice out of a book. He looks
older, and his hair is lined with grey; his eyes look clearer.
Mazeppa
© George Gordon Byron
'Twas after dread Pultowa's day,
When fortune left the royal Swede--
Around a slaughtered army lay,
No more to combat and to bleed.
Silent Music by Floyd Skloot: American Life in Poetry #94 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
While many of the poems we feature in this column are written in open forms, that's not to say I don't respect good writing done in traditional meter and rhyme. But a number of contemporary poets, knowing how a rigid attachment to form can take charge of the writing and drag the poet along behind, will choose, say, the traditional villanelle form, then relax its restraints through the use of broken rhythm and inexact rhymes. I'd guess that if I weren't talking about it, you might not notice, reading this poem by Floyd Skloot, that you were reading a sonnet.
Silent Music
The Princess In The Tower
© Sara Teasdale
I am the princess up in the tower
And I dream the whole day thro'
Of a knight who shall come with a silver spear
And a waving plume of blue.
Armageddon
© Leon Gellert
red with the bleeding year.
Sound is but a knell,
and Sleep has a scarlet bed.
Dreams are wet with Fear,
and Honour sits in Hell.
The Parting Of The Ways
© James Russell Lowell
Who hath not been a poet? Who hath not,
With life's new quiver full of winged years,
Shot at a venture, and then, following on,
Stood doubtful at the Parting of the Ways?
An Ode : While Blooming Youth And Gay Delight
© Matthew Prior
While blooming youth and gay delight
Sit on thy rosy cheeks confess'd,
Thou hast, my dear, undoubted right
To triumph o'er this destined breast.
My reason bends to what thy eyes ordain;
For I was born to love, and thou to reign.
Ascension Day
© John Keble
Soft cloud, that while the breeze of May
Chants her glad matins in the leafy arch,
Draw'st thy bright veil across the heavenly way
Meet pavement for an angel's glorious march:
Theoretikos
© Oscar Wilde
Against an heritage of centuries.
It mars my calm: wherefore in dreams of Art
And loftiest culture I would stand apart,
Neither for God, nor for his enemies.
Snow
© Archibald Lampman
White are the far-off plains, and white
The fading forests grow;
The wind dies out along the height,
And denser still the snow,
A gathering weight on roof and tree,
Falls down scarce audibly.
Victory
© Alfred Noyes
I.
Before those golden altar-lights we stood,
Each one of us remembering his own dead.
A more than earthly beauty seemed to brood
On that hushed throng, and bless each bending head.
To -----
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Fair Nature's priestesses! to whom,
In hieroglyph of bud and bloom,
Her mysteries are told;
Who, wise in lore of wood and mead,
The seasons' pictured scrolls can read,
In lessons manifold!
Poets At Seven Years
© Arthur Rimbaud
And the mother, closing the work-book
Went off, proud, satisfied, not seeing,
In the blue eyes, under the lumpy brow,
The soul of her child given over to loathing.
Amours De Voyage, Canto I
© Arthur Hugh Clough
I am to tell you, you say, what I think of our last new acquaintance.
Well, then, I think that George has a very fair right to be jealous.
I do not like him much, though I do not dislike being with him.
He is what people call, I suppose, a superior man, and
Certainly seems so to me; but I think he is terribly selfish.
